As the world becomes ever more tightly connected with the proliferation and increasing popularity of the Internet, electronic commerce will become increasingly important in our lives. Banks and other financial institutions allow customers to access their accounts over the Internet; brokerage houses allow clients to trade stocks, mutual funds and other securities over the Internet; and manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers allow customers to order and pay for products over the Internet. While the most significant financial transactions are still carried out over private electronic data interchange (EDI), bank, and interbank networks, consumer credit card transactions are carried out over the Internet with increasing frequency. While most of these credit card transactions are carried out with some form of encryption, user anxiety remains high because messages can be intercepted by third parties and translated at leisure, using common decryption techniques. Even though a relatively small percentage of Internet transactions contain credit card numbers, one could simply locate a merchant that accepts credit card transactions and search for those transactions having the merchant's IP address. This is guaranteed to lead to the discovery of numerous credit card containing packets which can then be decrypted offline.